Dear Travel writers

Marco Polo. Lawrence of Arabia. Thomas Cook. Hang on, what have package holidays got to do with great travel writing? And where are today's real explorers?

Yesterday Thomas Cook presented its annual pounds 7,500 award for the best travel book. A tradition of writing about exploration that goes back beyond Marco Polo is now in the business of promoting package tours. Is the travel book still interested in high-risk adventures that take the writers to their own limits at the edge of the known world? Or is it content to turn out well-mannered travelogues?

Of course, the problem is that today's world is almost all known. In an age of satellites, we don't need explorers to find new peaks or plateaux. England no longer expects its young men to risk their lives winning the allegiance of sheikhs and tribal chiefs to the Crown.

In fact, travel books metamorphosed into entertainment long ago. In the 1940s, Wilfred Thesiger and TE Lawrence could still claim, in their intimacy with empty quarters and Arab tribesmen, to be messengers from the unknown. But by 1958, when Eric Newby published his best-seller A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a self-consciousness had set in.

The curtain was fast falling on the Empire, but it got stuck half way down. As the British Dominions dribbled away, the travel book stayed on. How many dozens of books have been written plodding in the footsteps of some eccentric Victorian, or lolling in the fossilised Englishness of an Indian hill-station? As a nation we seem erotically attached to the image of being served tea by a man in a turban. Authors of travel books are often male and upper-class, and some still affect a Victorian air of patronising amusement at the behaviour of natives. Foreigners are either funny and friendly, or taciturn and untrustworthy.

It was an American, Paul Theroux, who made travel writing fashionable again. In 1975, his energetic The Great Railway Bazaar unleashed a wave of writing, much of it dire. Most of it seems to have come to Britain. In Europe and the US, travel books are rare, but we've see dozens of them a year. What more proof is needed that Britain is the world leader in nostalgia?

The Thomas Cook winner, Gavin Bell's In Search of Tusitala, is a sincere and thoughtful work. But where are the younger authors who explore the boundaries of a world of environmental pollution and satellite TV, in which a trip to Bangkok or Bolivia is, well, ordinary? I asked Mike Fishwick, a publishing director at HarperCollins, who has promoted several younger authors.

"There hasn't been anywhere spectacularly new to go for years," he told me. "The point is the quality, the wit, the elegance or the insights in the writing." So who are the new writers? He pointed me to Rory Maclean and Christa Paula.

They couldn't be more different. Maclean's Stalin's Nose is a brilliant fantasia spun out of a real journey. "The new boundaries are between genres," he says. "My journeys approach fiction." Christa Paula, whose The Road to Miran was on this year's Thomas Cook shortlist, disagrees: "Modern readers want a travel writer to be more honest than before, risking emotional involvement to tell the truth." (Maclean is Canadian, Paula German, though both work in Britain.) Personally, I agree with another travel writer, Katie Hickman, who has said that "the new journeys are within".

Come what may, travel writing needs a serious shot in the arm.